A Humble Beginning? Three Ways to Understand Brumel’s Missa Ut re mi fa sol la

Using that age-old device of elementary music pedagogy, the Guidonian hexachord, as the point of departure for an elaborate musical construction seems to have become fashionable around 1500. Antoine Brumel’s Missa Ut re mi fa sol la, published by Petrucci in his Misse Brumel (1503), but likely dating from the 1480s, is probably the first setting of the mass ordinary using the hexachord as a cantus firmus throughout, starting a tradition that was continued by composers including Palestrina and Morales. Though a dazzlingly virtuoso large-scale work, Brumel’s mass begins very humbly: While formally given to the ‘tenor’, the cantus firmus starts below the bassus, on the lowest note of the gamut. During the mass the cantus firmus works its way upwards through the entire (post-)Guidonian system until, in the Agnus Dei, it sounds in the superius. Though the ‘master plan’ of this compositional structure is quite evident, its cultural meaning is unclear. I offer three possible approaches to understanding the mass: Did Brumel intend his mass as a pedagogical work? Can we decipher a theological meaning couched in musical symbolism? Or can it be read as self-referential, meditating on the foundations of musica itself?